TWENTY-TWO

The guy at the next stop was no less a fuck-up than Anthony Marinello, just an older, more accomplished one. This time there was no wife for me to talk to. Patrick Scanlon had stubbornly clung to his career until the department basically told him to take a hike. He was a classic red-noser, a professional drinker with so many busted blood vessels in his face you could scan them like a barcode. He had skated by for nearly three decades until the FDNY really cracked down on drinking a few years ago. The last straw was a New Year’s Eve brawl at a firehouse on Staten Island that involved whiskey, a folding chair to the chops, a broken jaw, and a tumble down a staircase. When the incident was thoroughly investigated, all sorts of bad things came out of it and the department put its foot down hard. Indiscretions that’d traditionally been tolerated or treated with wrist slaps were now fireable offenses. Guys like Scanlon either saw the writing on the wall or had it shown to them. I wouldn’t have been shocked to learn that the desk Scanlon vacated when he put in his papers was taken over by Anthony Marinello.

Scanlon showed me down to his den in the basement. He was a hunter and a fisherman and had the trophies to prove it. He was a big man with a shock of white hair and gray stubble and a surly son of a bitch. No matter how I tried, it was difficult to get him to focus. That sort of worked for and against me. When I pointed out that his Cropsey Avenue address was only a short car ride to the Grotto, he looked at me like I was talking in tongues.

“I don’t even like their fucking pizza,” he said.

Well, I thought, Scanlon had at least one redemptive feature: he knew mediocre pizza when he tasted it.

He sobered up a little bit when I showed him my old badge and a copy of the rather disgusting email he had sent to Alta Conseco and Maya Watson only a week before Alta was murdered. He wasn’t the type to challenge my badge even if I looked too old to be carrying it. When I pressed him about his threats, he didn’t exactly ask for forgiveness.

“Fuck them two cunts,” he said. “They stained us all by leaving that man to die like that. They’re a fucking disgrace!”

I bit the inside of my cheek again. It was going to be a rough day for the inside of my cheek.

“Is that how you see women, as cunts? You seemed pretty sure about what you’d do to their anatomy if you ever got hold of them.”

“How did you get a hold of that anyways?” he slurred. “I didn’t put my name on it.”

“You’re proud of that, huh, hiding behind a phony name? If you had half a brain, you’d know there are ways to track emails.”

“No need to get insulting.”

“I’m sorry. Did I hurt your feelings? Why would I want to insult a coward who hides behind a fake name and threatens women and calls them cunts? Gee, I wonder.”

“Okay, so I’m an asshole sometimes. It’s the drink.”

“First refuge of a coward, blaming everybody and everything but himself.”

He seemed not to hear me. “Hey, I gotta piss. All right?”

“It’s your house and your dick. Go ahead.”

When he left the den, I took a closer look at the décor. I noticed three taxidermied fish on the walls and a framed photo of Scanlon with some hunting buddies standing over the carcass of deer. In another, he posed holding the limp body of a wild turkey by its neck. In yet another, his feet were surrounded by a stack of dead ducks and geese. On the wall to my right I noticed a locked gun rack with two shotguns and three bolt action rifles. There was a glass case with some wall-mounted handguns that weren’t just there for show and next to that case was a wall display of hunting knives, machetes, bayonets, ceremonial knives, one with an ivory handle and a black swastika affixed to the hilt, a Confederate cavalry saber, and a samurai sword.

“What were we talking about?” he asked when he returned.

I ignored him. “Where’s the knife that goes there?” I asked, pointing to a conspicuously empty spot on the wall.

He didn’t like that question and I could see the gears turning. “No knife goes there. I, um, I haven’t filled that spot yet.”

He was completely unconvincing. “Don’t bullshit me, Patrick. You can see the silhouette of it. You know that Alta Conseco was stabbed to death, right? So here’s what I’m looking at: a death threat from you, a nasty drunk who lives five minutes away from the crime scene, a missing knife, and a very dead woman. Can you do the math? Because I can.”

“I wouldn’t’a killed that dyke.”

“Dyke?”

“Yeah, yeah, she tried to hide it, but I heard shit.”

“How the fuck would you hear shit?” I said. “You’ve been out of the department for a few years.”

“What, you think because I got forced out, I don’t hear things? You hang out at McPhee’s, you hear plenty.”

I shook my head. “That place again. What is it with you guys and that bar?”

“You know McPhee’s?”

“I know it. But we’re getting off the subject here. You haven’t said one word that disputes my math, Scanlon. I still got the same problem.”

He dipped his head like a little kid who’d been caught boosting a pack of gum at the local candy store. “I sold that knife months ago, way before that—before what’s-her-name was murdered. I can prove it.”

“Why didn’t you just say that?”

“It wasn’t my knife to sell. It belonged to one of my old hunting buddies. We had a falling out, but I kept it and then I sold it.”

“Do you think I give a shit? I’m not from the stolen knife squad, for chrissakes!”

That was a dumb thing to say because now Scanlon was taking his first good look at me. I hadn’t quite told him before who I was and what the exact nature of my business was. The old badge had worked well enough and I had let his drunken mind fill in the blanks. Now fear was sobering him up pretty fast. I had to get his mind off me and back on the subject.

“Okay, so you sold that knife, but you got lots more here and probably dozens more I don’t see.” I picked up the Nazi knife with the fancy handle. It was probably some bonus gift to an SS man for killing the largest number of my relatives in a single month. “What about this one?” I asked, twirling it in my hand and then dropping it.

He cringed. “Hey, cut that out. That’s worth a lotta—”

“Or this one?” I knocked a hunting knife to the floor.

“Cut it out. Cut it out! Those are worth—”

I knocked another one to the floor. That did it. He came at me, swinging wildly, blindly and missing by a mile. I sidestepped, leaving my right leg out for him to stagger over. He tripped, sprawling into a leather recliner and then to the floor. He rolled over, but didn’t get up for a second run at me. He probably wanted to, but the thing of it was I was now showing him some hardware of my own. I had my old .38 out and pointed straight at his belly.

“That’s enough of that, shithead. I couldn’t miss you from here even if I was blindfolded.”

He held his hands up, palms out in surrender. “I swear I didn’t do nothing to her. I was mad, sure. We was all mad at them, but I didn’t kill nobody.”

“Not like you haven’t hit a woman before,” I said. “You were arrested a few months ago for—”

“It wasn’t like that. She hit me first. We had a fender bender on Bay Parkway and the bitch gets out of the car and slaps me in the face. I grabbed her wrists and then some passersby grabbed me and called 911. It was all fucked up. The charges were dropped. You can check it out. I done some shitty things in my life, but I ain’t never hit a woman.”

“Okay, get up.” I put my gun away. “I’m leaving now. If I were you—god forbid—I would try real hard to find someone who could alibi you for the night Alta Conseco was murdered. Someone other than a relative.”

“I didn’t touch that dyke, I swear.”

I let myself out. Problem was, I believed the prick. I had nothing to back it up beyond the sense that he was telling me the truth. He was a bad liar and it was my experience that it was hard for people to fake being bad at something. Scanlon was just a bag of leaves: all puffed up, but ultimately weak and full of hot air and decay. I suppose he’d be worth taking a second look at and I would call Fuqua to let him know what I’d found. What bothered me more was him calling Alta a dyke. I mean, that’s what guys on the job do. If a woman doesn’t swoon at the sight of them or keeps to herself or doesn’t wear enough makeup to suit them, she gets labeled as gay. It happened when I was on the cops and it hadn’t changed. I didn’t care one way or the other but if it was true that Alta was gay, it added yet another ingredient to the mix that might complicate things more than they already seemed to be. With every step, the slippery slope got steeper and more slippery.